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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
towers reached the factory in which they were made from yet another place.
The person who put together the IKEA-like instructions was maybe placed
at the same factory, maybe somewhere else, the paper produced from wood
felled at another site. The trucks that brought them here were probably
serviced regularly by a mechanic. These networks of people and things
demonstrate that the making and assembling of these watchtowers involved
many different people, vehicles, tools which can all be seen as actors in their
construction. What becomes clear through following these connections is
how the totalitarian and dark oppression of people that I first wanted to
place on a symbolic piece of barbed wire extended so much longer, further
to include so much more, and in that making it somehow stronger. None of
these different elements can be seen as responsible for the oppression of the
people but they were all part of a system that held this oppression together,
even though it might have been unknown to them. These were people who
got up in the morning and headed off to their job in a factory or a
mechanics, a job like any other. I came here to find the barbed wire of the
metaphor I had got to know as I grew up but what I find is something else.
As I climbed down the metal steps of the watchtower I realized that this is
not monumental, in fact, it is rather mundane.
One can see this as a sort of material correlation to Hannah Arendt’s
observations of how networks in society can create circumstances where
evil can be found in the ordinary, the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt 1963:252). In
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Arendt wrote about
the former SS officer Adolf Eichmann who was put on trial in Jerusalem
and subsequently found guilty and hung for his role in “the final solution of
the Jewish question” (Arendt 1963:5). Arendt’s observations as she looks
closely at his role in the Nazi machine show that by breaking down events,
people and places into smaller pieces when studying them it becomes clear
how they can appear much more banal and ordinary than first thought. She
described how people expected to see a monster in court, something encouraged
by the prosecution (Arendt 1963:54), but instead they saw an
ordinary looking man: “medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding
hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes” (Arendt 1963:5) who was more a
clown than a monster. Even if our historical knowledge makes us look at a
person, a material or an event through particular glasses, creating expectations
of what we should find, it often becomes clear when looking at the
smaller pieces that what we see as evil can be found in the most ordinary
and banal.
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